Morgan le Fay

Morgan le Fay is an enchantress of Arthurian legend whose character changes greatly across medieval and modern texts. She is often described as Arthur’s half-sister and may appear as healer, rival, seductress, political opponent or guardian of Avalon.

Morgan’s earliest surviving literary form differs markedly from the later hostile sorceress. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Vita Merlini, she is a learned healer associated with Avalon who receives the wounded Arthur, and she is not yet presented as his sister. French romance cycles gradually made her a member of Arthur’s family and developed her into a more morally ambiguous figure, sometimes protective and sometimes antagonistic; Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur helped establish this contradictory form for later English tradition.

In Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Hank believes technology and republican ideas can dismantle feudal privilege, but his reforms collide with the authority of the Church, the ambitions of Merlin and the courtly world surrounding Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot and Morgan le Fay. John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights retells the early books of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur in modern prose, beginning with Arthur’s concealed birth, the sword that proves his kingship and the wars required to establish the Round Table. Merlin’s guidance and foreknowledge shape the new kingdom, while the stories of Guinevere, Morgan le Fay, Gawain and Lancelot introduce the rival loyalties and desires that threaten Arthur’s ideal. Morgan le Fay is treated fictionally in Mary Stewart’s The Prince and the Pilgrim and Peter Ackroyd’s The Death of King Arthur.